THE FIRST TIME

The first record that Nick Hamlyn bought with his own money was Chubby Checker's Let's Twist Again, just after his tenth birthday. His interest in music grew, proceeding in a very similar manner to the experiences of Harrison Ashby, the hero of Nick's 2015 novel, Music For A Desert Island. As a student at UEA, with limited funds, Nick often had to choose between buying records and buying food. He ate a lot of bread and margarine, but his record collection was larger than anyone else's he knew. Some years later, realising that he had thousands of records but was playing only hundreds, he opened a record shop to get rid of the surplus. With his surname, there was only one possibility for the name of the shop. It was Pied Piper Records. After twenty-four years, when Nick transferred his energies to the internet, he had to admit that his original strategy had not worked - his personal music collection had become many times larger.
In 1990 he decided to draw on nearly thirty years of music collecting knowledge by publishing his first Collectors' Record Price Guide. During the next decade and a half, the Guide moved through six editions, the later ones published by Penguin Books, and selling well enough to appear, from time to time, in the top ten non-fiction chart (yes, there was one!). During this time he also wrote regular articles for Music Collector magazine and contributed to Vox. His first appearance in print had come rather earlier than this, when he won second prize in a music writing competition organised by Melody Maker in 1980.
Nick has played guitar in several bands over the years. The first, a poetry and music collective called Paris Green (well it was the late sixties) also included the future writing star, Douglas Adams. Much later, Nick was delighted to find himself playing in the same band as a former member of the progressive rock group, Solstice. Another later band, called Four Bop Drop, released a CD of relentlessly uncommercial improvised music on the Slam label in 1997. In live performances on different occasions, this band accompanied trombonist Paul Rutherford and baritone saxophonist George Haslam, alto saxophonist George Khan, and drummer Charles Hayward. Most recently, Nick has appeared on several occasions in a duo with his sister, Cathy, performing songs written by both of them.